{"id":55916,"date":"2023-12-19T19:36:24","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T23:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55916"},"modified":"2023-12-19T19:36:24","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T23:36:24","slug":"upholding-a-universitys-core-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55916","title":{"rendered":"Upholding a university\u2019s core mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nDecember 19, 2023<\/em><\/p>\n

What you\u2019re seeing now is a handful of super-ultra-wealthy individuals—plutocrats that, I guess you would call philanthropists—who have incredible leverage over higher education.<\/BLOCKQUOTE> <\/p>\n

—Isaac Kamola, professor, Trinity College<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>On Monday December 5, the presidents of Harvard University (Claudine Gay), the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill), and MIT (Sally Korn\u00adbluth) were summoned by the US Congress to answer how well they responded to threats that are made against Jewish students at their universities, and whether students who call for the genocide of Jews should be disciplined.
\n
\nThe members of Congress did not like the \u201cevasive\u201d responses they received from the presidents. As a result, 71 members wrote to the governing boards of these three universities, urging them to remove them from leadership positions. Several donors and other prominent leaders joined in the call for their removal.<\/p>\n

On December 5, Magill resigned from her position. Rep Elise Stefanik, the leader of the pack, was gleeful. She wrote on X (formerly Twitter): \u201cOne down, Two to go,\u201d meaning it was only a matter of time before Gay and Kornbluth were forced to resign.<\/p>\n

Bill Ackman was among Gay\u2019s most vocal critics. He implied that she only got the job because she was black. He wrote: \u201cI learned from someone with first person knowledge of the @Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] office\u2019s criteria… It is also not good for those awarded the office of president who find themselves in a role that they would likely not have obtained were it not for a fat finger on the scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard University, the oldest university in the United States, was founded 387 years ago in 1636. All of its presidents, with the exception of Dr Gay and Dr Drew Gilpin Faust, were white men. The same is true for Yale, which was founded 322 years ago in 1701. All of its presidents were white men. No one has ever questioned whether the fat finger of whiteness was on the scale for the selection of the presidents of Yale or Harvard.<\/p>\n

Last Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation, the university\u2019s governing board, affirmed its confidence in Dr Gay. It averred: \u201cAs members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay\u2019s continued leadership of Harvard University. Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.\u201d (\u201cStatement from the Harvard Corporation\u201d, December 12.)<\/p>\n

What did Dr Gay do wrong? Ackman phoned her. She refused to answer his call. Ackman says: \u201cIt would have been smart for her to listen, or to at least pick up the phone.\u201d It was \u201ca part of a stream of calls, texts and letters to university officials\u201d that he had sent to the university. (NYT, December 12.)<\/p>\n

Such demands raise the question: how much control should these moneybags have over the academic running of a university?<\/p>\n

Ackman made a lot of money (he is worth about $3.8 billion) investing in technology, but does not have the intellectual credentials to dictate what a university should teach at the university level.<\/p>\n

The curriculum of a university is the most prized jewel of its existence. Every university fights unrelentingly over it to maintain its academic integrity. In 1978, under the guidance of Henry Rosovsky, the dean of Harvard\u2019s College of Arts and Sciences, Harvard overhauled its curriculum and replaced it with something called \u201cthe Core Curriculum\u201d that replaced \u201cthe General Education\u201d requirements of the 1940s.<\/p>\n

It sought to answer one question: when one receives an undergraduate degree from Harvard or any American institution, what was one expected to know when one joined the ranks of \u201ceducated men and women\u201d of the United States? As a Harvard faculty member, I made the following contribution to the debate. I reasoned that no United States citizen could consider himself or herself an \u201ceducated Ameri\u00adcan\u201d if s\/he was unaware of the contributions Africans and African Americans had made to the development of the US.<\/p>\n

As a result of our representation, one Afro-American studies course, Black \u00adLiterary Movements of the Early 20th Century, was included in the 77 courses that were included in the core requirements. The Harvard Crimson reported: \u201cThis course is the only offering under Literature and Arts which will concentrate exclusively on twentieth century literature.\u201d (Harvard Crimson, May 11, 1979.) Much credit must go to Prof Ewart Guinier, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department, for this achievement.<\/p>\n

In other words, matters of the curriculum and the shaping of a university education cannot be left to moneybags who, in many instances, know very little about what it takes to shape a college edu\u00adcation. Benjamin Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School, noted correctly: \u201cWe can\u2019t function as a university if we\u2019re answerable to random rich guys and the mobs they mobilise on Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Universities must work together to find their voices. They should always be places of free enquiry. Their policies should not be dictated by right- or left-wing zealots nor, for that matter, the rich \u00admoneybags who have their own partisan bias to inflict upon students.<\/p>\n

It is good that Harvard and MIT stood up for the edu\u00adcational integrity of American universities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe December 19, 2023 What you\u2019re seeing now is a handful of super-ultra-wealthy individuals—plutocrats that, I guess you would call philanthropists—who have incredible leverage over higher education. —Isaac Kamola, professor, Trinity College On Monday December 5, the presidents of Harvard University (Claudine Gay), the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill), and MIT … Continue reading Upholding a university\u2019s core mission<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[568,1,5,39],"tags":[1458,171],"class_list":["post-55916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-general-tt","category-international","category-usa","tag-harvard-university","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55917,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55916\/revisions\/55917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}